There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no existence.  We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau’s case by accident.  He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any thought of writing.  He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never entered into his dreams.  When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.

One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.  One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead with hunger and thirst.  His entertainer offered him nothing more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk.  Presently, after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards.  Then he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on account of the duties, and his bread on account of the taille, and declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not dying of hunger.  All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never forgot.  “Here,” he says, “was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass the common people, and against all their oppressors.  This man actually did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned around him."[67]

It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company, that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell.  The man who had been a servant, who had wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept in dens, who had been befriended by rough men